Duke Ellington and his Orchestra opened at Al Hirt's Club, Bourbon Street on Monday, 20 April, 1970. During this engagement, Ellington ran down those charts for his New Orleans Suite which comprised the main movement of the Suite - notably Thanks For The Beautiful Land, Aristocracy A La Jean Lafitte, Second Line, Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies and Blues For New Orleans and which Ellington took into the studio two days later to begin work on recording the album.
Today, 25 April 2020, is the fiftieth anniversary of Ellington's appearance at the New Orleans Jazz Festival and the genesis of The New Orleans Suite with a performance of the opening 'movement' of the suite, Blues for New Orleans. You can listen to the performance for free at Paste Magazine.
And on the subject of Paste, I've pasted or re-posted from a couple of sources on Ellington's appearance at the festival on this celebratory day. No copyright infringement intended and all sources acknowledged...
Jazz Times:
Duke Ellington & George Wein: Civilizing New Orleans
Tom Reney connects the legendary bandleader with the festival promoter and the roots of Jazz Fest in New Orleans
Duke’s appearance at the 1970 New Orleans Jazz Festival and Louisiana Heritage Fair was the third annual jazz festival in New Orleans, but the first that George Wein produced under the Jazz & Heritage banner, and for the occasion Ellington was commissioned to write a new work, The New Orleans Suite. The audio file from Wolfgang’s Vault includes only the suite’s opening movement, “Blues for New Orleans,” a showcase for Johnny Hodges and organist Wild Bill Davis. Ellington was notorious for completing new works minutes before deadline, but it would seem that most of the suite must have been ready at the time of the festival appearance on April 25 since its recording for Atlantic Records was completed only 18 days later on May 13. Then again, maybe not.
In any event, the set begins with Wein’s introduction of Duke, and his announcement that the festival would be returning the following year despite a loss of $40,000 in its inaugural presentation under his stewardship. (This weekend marks the 42nd consecutive presentation of Jazz and Heritage. The content has changed considerably from Wein’s original conception of a fest devoted almost exclusively to music from New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, but attendance remains an annual rite for tens of thousands of pilgrims to the Big Easy.) Highlights from the Ellington concert include a customary Hodges mini-set that includes “Blues for New Orleans,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower,” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” Mercer Ellington’s classic blues; “In Triplicate,” a tour de force flagwaver for saxophonists Paul Gonsalves, Russell Procope, and Harold Ashby; and Wild Bill Davis playing his famous arrangement for Count Basie of “April in Paris,” with Duke crediting the original “one more once” orchestration for “establishing a majestic way of monumental cool.”
At the conclusion of “Blues for New Orleans,” Duke hails the band as “Buddy Bolden’s Second Line.” “King” Bolden was the New Orleans trumpeter whom legend regards as the pivotal figure in the transition from ragtime to what later came to be called jazz, but his institutionalization for “acute alcoholic psychosis” in 1907 resulted in his near total absence from the historical and musical record. Officially, about all that exists on Bolden are records from the New Orleans City Directory and the Insane Asylum of Louisiana, but a photo of the trumpeter with his six-piece band and the published recollections of Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet give considerable support to Bolden’s stature as what Morton called “The blowingest man ever lived since Gabriel.”
A “second line” of New Orleanians, clarinetist Barney Bigard and bassist Wellman Braud, provided Ellington with an early and essential stylistic foundation, and trumpeter Bubber Miley, a South Carolina native, emulated another New Orleans legend, King Oliver, in developing the growling, “wah wah” brass style that became a signature element in Ellington’s tonal palette. Bechet, who’d dated Hodges’s older sister when the great reedman was playing in Boston around 1920, toured with Ellington during the band’s summer sojourns in New England in the mid-’20’s. He never recorded with Duke, but Ellington praised him as a player whose music was “all soul.” Credit New Orleans jazz, its origins and its legacy, with playing a vital and ongoing role in the imagination of Edward Kennedy Ellington.
Here are the 'liner notes' for this recording from Wolfgang's Vault...
The New Orleans Suite was one of the most fully-realized of Ellington’s latter-day works, offering portraits of Bechet, Braud, Louis Armstrong, and Mahalia Jackson, and evocative pieces like Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies and Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta. While its themes were historical, the music was in tune with jazz in the early ’70’s, and it won the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band in 1971. Alas, it was the last recording to feature Hodges, who died on May 11, 1970; reputedly, he was poised to play soprano saxophone for the first time in almost 40 years on Portrait of Sidney Bechet.
A poignant footnote that goes unmentioned in Wein’s introduction is that the road to a jazz fest in New Orleans was fraught with cancellations and postponements due to racism and Jim Crow customs that remained in effect through most of the ’60’s. Crescent City officials first approached Wein in 1962, but when the impresario met with them in a private dining room at the Royal Orleans Hotel, he made it clear that his fest would include integrated ensembles, and that Duke Ellington, who’d be part of anything Wein produced, “is accustomed to being treated as royalty wherever he goes. He stays only in the finest hotels.” Wein detailed the saga of establishing Jazz & Heritage in his memoir, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, and reports that the lunch ended with a consensus view “that the time had not yet come for a jazz festival in the South.” (Among the bizarre customs still in force in NOLA in the 60’s were ones that permitted blacks and whites to be in the same place only out-of-doors, not in an indoor facility; and black and white groups could appear in succession, but not together, on the same stage.)
By the time a fest was presented in 1968, it was Willis Conover, the renowned jazz host of the Voice of America (and a longtime emcee at Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival), who was hired to produce it. Wein learned through the grapevine that his own marriage to an African American, Joyce Alexander, “might be a political embarrassment to [New Orleans] Mayor Schiro if [he] were given the job,” so it went to Conover. It took only two years for the festival to become mired in local politics before the New Orleans Hotel Motel Association brought in Wein to run it once and for all. The festival is now owned by the non-profit Jazz & Heritage Foundation which is chaired by Quint Davis, the New Orleans native who’s been involved with the festival since its inception under Wein. But credit the respect Duke Ellington had earned elsewhere in the world with making it necessary for New Orleans to begin getting its act together before a bonafide jazz festival would be presented in the city of its birth.
Tom Reney looks back at Duke Ellington’s New Orleans Suite and the crucial role that Duke and festival producer George Wein played in the establishment of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which just completed its 49th annual presentation in the Crescent City. Wein’s insistence that any festival he produced would include Ellington, who “stayed only in the finest hotels,” and feature integrated ensembles was a spur to ending rigid segregation practices in New Orleans.
You can tune in to the podcast here.
From Wolfgang's Vault (Source)
Duke Ellington - piano, composer; Cootie Williams - trumpet; Frank Stone - trumpet; Money Johnson - trumpet; Al Rubin - trumpet; Cat Anderson - trumpet; Booty Wood - trombone; Julian Priester - trombone; Malcolm Taylor - bass trombone; Chuck Connors - bass trombone; Russell Procope - alto saxophone, clarinet; Johnny Hodges - alto saxophone; Norris Turney - tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute; Harold Ashby - tenor saxophone, clarinet; Paul Gonsalves - tenor saxophone; Harry Carney - clarinet, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone; Wild Bill Davis - organ; Joe Benjamin - bass; Rufus "Speedy" Jones - drums; Tony Watkins - vocals
To kick off the inaugural New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1970, impresario George Wein addressed the crowd at Municipal Auditorium: "This particular festival, along with the Newport Folk Festival, has moved me more than any festival I've been involved with. We've struck a chord here in the city, mostly with the performers and the artists. It's something that I think can really develop into one of the major festivals in the world." Indeed, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, now in its 42nd year, continues to be a preferred destination for music lovers all over country and throughout the world.
While the major headliners performed in Municipal Auditorium that first year of the festival, local gospel, blues, zydeco, cajun and jazz bands were showcased outdoors at Beauregard Square (renamed Congo Square the following year). Today the whole sprawling enterprise - 12 stages of music spanning a wide stylistic spectrum -- takes place at the Fair Grounds Racetrack and draws crowds upwards of 650,000 over two consecutive weekends. From it's humble beginnings - the inaugural festival drew small crowds and operated in the red - the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has grown to become one of the premier attractions on the international festival circuit.
The Ellington Orchestra kicks off it's New Orleans performance with a spirited reading of the Duke classic C Jam Blues, which features some exuberant blowing from clarinetist Russell Procope, trumpeter Cootie Williams, tenor saxophonist Harold Ashby and trombonist Booty Wood. Trumpeter Williams is next featured on Take the 'A' Train. Ellington opens this Billy Strayhorn tune with an unusual waltz-time piano trio arrangement before segueing to the standard 4/4 swing vibe. The powerhouse horns kick in on the familiar theme and Williams leads the way with his loose, high-note trumpet solo.
Blues for New Orleans (one of the pieces from Ellington's New Orleans Suite, which George Wein had commissioned for this inaugural New Orleans Jazz Festival) is a laid back and earthy, organ-fueled showcase for some gospel-tinged testifying by alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, in one of his last performances with the Duke Ellington Orchestra (he passed away three weeks after this New Orleans Jazz Festival concert, on 11 May, 1970). The great Hodges follows with an inspired, tender reading of Strayhorn's sublime ballad Passion Flower before leading the band through a swaggering rendition of Mercer Ellington's bouncy blues shuffle, Things Ain't What They Used to Be. Hammond organist Wild Bill Davis is next featured on his own orchestral arrangement of Count Basie's April in Paris, accompanied only by the rhythm tandem of bassist Joe Benjamin and drummer Rufus "Speedy" Jones through the piece, until the horns kick in on the final jubilant chorus. Ellington sounds elated here as he twice calls the band back for "One more time!" in traditional Basie fashion. And he concludes the piece by giving the spotlight to a whirlwind Jones drum solo.
The three tenors -- Paul Gonzalvez, Norris Turney and Harold Ashby - battle it out on the uptempo burner In Triplicate, which had been a highlight of Ellington's 70th birthday concert the previous year. Singer Tony Watkins then performs the easy swinging pop trifle Making That Scene, an Ellington tune written for Tony Bennett and which would later appear on Duke's 1971 studio recording Togo Brava Suite on Denmark's Storyville label. Watkins then leads the band through a contemporary soul-jazz boogaloo, Be Cool and Groovy for Me, which is strangely co-credited to Ellington, Cootie Williams and Tony Bennett and includes some hip spoken word rhymes by the rapping Duke. (Jazz critic David Hajdu called it "the worst song ever written by a great and important composer," and while it does smack of a 70-year-old trying to remain 'relevant' by picking up on the hippie flavor of the moment, it's more just some good-natured fun with a beat being played out on the bandstand). They close their New Orleans Jazz Festival set with a buoyantly swinging rendition of Ellington's classic Satin Doll that prominently features organist Wild Bill Davis. Duke bids the Municipal Auditorium adieu with his usual hipster farewell: "I don't have to tell you, one never snaps one's fingers on the beat. It's considered aggressive. Don't push it, just let it fall. And if you would like to be respectably hip, then at the same time tilt the left earlobe. Establish a state of nonchalance. And if you would like to be respectably cool, then tilt the left earlobe on the beat and snap the finger on the after beat. And then, you really don't care. And so by routine-ing one's finger snapping and choreographing one's earlobe tilting, one discovers that one can become as cool as one wishes to be. We want to remind you that you're very beautiful, very sweet, very gracious, very generous…and we love you madly."
In Triplicate features Paul, Ashby, and Norris Turney, not Russell Procope.
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